the final bird word, for now

For those of us who yearn to fly somewhere — anywhere — when we spy wild geese, February has been outstanding.

For those of us who yearn to fly somewhere — anywhere — when we spy wild geese, February has been outstanding.

According to Lee Albright, manager at Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge, there were 125,000 snow geese on the South Pool last week. He says the honkers fly out to the fields to feed during the day, which is why random motorists can spot so many. Last Friday, looking up over Farmington, you could barely mark a single V in the raucous scrum overhead. It was more of an overlapping flapping alphabet of Ms and Ws and Js and Os. Just when it crosses your mind that looking up at so many geese may not be advisable, sans umbrella, there's a lone bald eagle cruising along beneath them.

Perhaps more importantly, the Chautauqua folks also counted 9,300 mallards on the North Pool, and 650 mallards on the South Pool — about a third more than the 6,800-mallard high last fall. Albright suspects the birds are finding nutsedge seed, one of the main by-products of draining the pool to mimic the natural river cycles.